Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 March 2016
This article by Rosemary Auchmuty and Erika Rackley introduces the Women's Legal Landmarks Project. The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration involving feminist scholars from law and other disciplines engaging in the process of identifying, researching and producing critical accounts of the key legal events, cases and statutes which represent significant turning points for women in the UK and Ireland. In creating the first scholarly anthology of legal landmarks for women spanning four jurisdictions and spanning eleven centuries, it seeks to contribute both to the development of the discipline of feminist legal history as well as societal understandings of the contribution women have made to public life and, more specifically, their involvement in the production of law, law reform and justice.
1 Thomas, T.A. and Boisseau, T.J. (eds), Feminist Legal History: Essays on Women and Law. New York: New York University Press 2011, p.1.
2 Ibid p.2.
3 E.g. Spring, E., Land, Law and Family: Aristocratic Inheritance in England, 1300 to 1800. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1993; Staves, S., Married Women's Separate Property in England, 1660–1833. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1990; Stetson, D., A Woman's Issue: The Politics of Family Law Reform in England. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 1982.
4 Auchmuty, R., ‘Early Women Law Students at Cambridge and Oxford’. 29 Journal of Legal History (2008) 63–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Auchmuty, R., ‘Whatever happened to Miss Bebb? Bebb v The Law Society and women's legal history’. 31 Legal Studies (2011) 199–230CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Auchmuty, R., ‘Law and the Power of Feminism: How feminism lost its power to oppress women’. 20 Feminist Legal Studies (2012) 71–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Auchmuty, R., ‘Recovering lost lives: researching women in legal history’. 42 Journal of Law and Society (2015) 34–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Polden, P., ‘The Lady of Tower Bridge: Sybil Campbell, England's first woman judge’, 8 Women's History Review (1993) 505Google Scholar; Polden, P., ‘Portia's Progress: Women and the Bar, 1919–1939’. 12 International Journal of the Legal Profession (2005) 293CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 For instance, Marriage Law and Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century, Cambridge UP 2009; The Changing Legal Regulation of Cohabitation: from Fornicators to Family 1600–2010, Cambridge UP 2012.
6 See the Institute of Advanced Studies' YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNJnkXq2mIAIIJ42jES2fJQ [accessed 26 January 2016].
7 See Maynard, M. and Purvis, J (eds) Researching Women's Lives from a Feminist Perspective. London: Taylor & Francis 1994; British Library, ‘Sisterhood and After: an oral history of the Women's Liberation Movement’. http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/sisterhood/, last accessed 2/11/14.